Payne Stewart

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There's an argument that says the 9/11 attacks couldn't have succeeded if the FAA and NORAD had only followed standard procedures, as at least some of the planes would have been intercepted in time. The 1999 case of Payne Stewart is occasionally used as an example of just how fast intercepts can be.

According to published accounts, fighter jets intercepted Stewart’s jet in either 15 or 21 minutes after his plane first lost contact.Page 200, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in the USA, Webster Tarpley

On October 25, 1999, at 9:33 a.m. air traffic controllers in Florida lost touch with a Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart and several companions after it left Orlando headed for Dallas, Texas. Nineteen minutes after Air Traffic Control realized something was wrong, one or more US Air Force fighter jets were already on top of the situation, in the air, close to the Learjet.http://www.prisonplanet.com/hijackology_101_did_norad_send_the_suicide_jets_on_911.html

It should be reiterated that procedures also require controllers to immediately alert the military to scramble fighter craft, if a plane deviates from its flight path and communication between the plane and controllers is blocked. This occurs whether or not the situation consists of a potential hijacking, as was the case with Payne Stuart’s Lear jet, which was intercepted by military planes almost immediately, and while communication with the jet was blocked.Page 148, The War On Freedom, Nafeez Ahmed

It's certainly true that there were initial media reports suggesting Air Force jets intercepted the plane only around 20 minutes after contact was lost. But this isn't actually what happened.

The evidence

The NTSB accident report available online reveals this timeline.

"At 0933:38 EDT (6 minutes and 20 seconds after N47BA acknowledged the previous clearance), the controller instructed N47BA to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA. The controller called the flight five more times over the next 4 1/2 minutes but received no response.

Read this carefully and you'll notice a change of time zone, from Eastern to Central time. CDT is one hour on from EDT, so the lack of contact was first noticed at around 09:34, accepted as a loss of contact at 9:44, and the fighter didn't get to within 2000 feet of Stewart’s jet until 10:54. That's well over an hour between the controllers realising there’s a problem, to intercept taking place.

There's further confirmation of this in the statement to the NTSB of intercept pilot Chris Hamilton:

After completing our training maneuvers... we were preparing to RTB at approximately 1350Z.

...I proceeded to... refuel...

After checking in with Jacksonville Center at approximately 1413Z, I was told to fly heading 015... [various controller interactions followed]

At 1443Z, I made radar contact with the target at a range of approximately 30 NM. At 1450Z, I had closed to 10 NM... At 1452Z, at a range of 8 NM, I picked the aircraft up visually...Statement of Captain Chris Hamilton

Around 39 minutes elapsed between Hamilton checking in with Jacksonville ATC and making visual contact with the Lear Jet.

The detailed NTSB factual report provides the following timeline.

1333Z - flight fails to respond to radar contact

1336Z - aircraft considered to be an emergency. Controllers continue to try and contact the plane for another 20 minutes.
1345Z - ZJX Watch Manager informs the FAA Southern Regional Office and the US Air Force Rescue Coordination Centre of the situation.
1400Z - ZJX Mission Coordinator contacts US Air Force Southest Air Defence to request an intercept.
1425Z - ZTL begins providing radar vectors to F16 to aid in the intercept
1444Z - ZTL transfers radar identification to Memphis ARTCC (ZME)
1452Z - F16 reports visual contact with aircraft

This situation was also recognised by some press and other reports, which provided more details (our emphasis).

Officials from the North American Aerospace Defense Command at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs coordinated emergency flights to monitor the Learjet's flight.

The first sign of trouble came at 10:08 a.m. EDT, as Air Force Staff Sgt. James Hicks sat in his air-control tower. A clearly troubled Federal Aviation Administration worker was issuing a distress call for a Learjet not far away.

The twin-engine craft had left Orlando, Fla., less than hour earlier and things had turned very strange. The jet was flying erratically. The pilot did not answer radio transmissions. Could Hicks, from his post at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., send a F-16 to check it out?

Hicks didn't know U.S. Open champion Stewart and at least four others were on board. Neither did Capt. Chris Hamilton, who was immediately pulled off maneuvers over the Gulf of Mexico and ordered to give chase.

The end came four hours, six states and 1,400 miles later when a chartered jet nose-dived into a South Dakota field.

Hamilton had to stop for fuel, so it took 50 minutes to close the Learjet's 100-mile lead. And once the Air Force pilot got a clear look at the smaller craft, his heart dropped.

"It's a very helpless feeling to pull up alongside another aircraft and realize the people inside ... are unconscious or in some other way incapacitated," he said.

A preliminary chronology developed by the Air Force of events surrounding the crash Monday of a Learjet whose passengers included professional golfer Payne Stewart. Material in quotations is verbatim from the chronology. All times are EDT.

The FAA said air traffic controllers lost radio contact with the plane at 9:44 a.m...

Pentagon officials said the military began its pursuit of the ghostly civilian aircraft at 10:08 a.m., when two Air Force F-16 fighters from Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida that were on a routine training mission were asked by the FAA to intercept it. The F-16s did not reach the Learjet, but an Air Force F-15 fighter from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida that also was asked to locate it got within sight of the aircraft and stayed with it from 11:09 a.m. to 11:44 a.m., when the military fighter was diverted to St. Louis for fuel.

Fifteen minutes later, four Air National Guard F-16s and a KC-135 tanker from Tulsa were ordered to try to catch up with the Learjet but got only within 100 miles. But two other Air National Guard F-16s from Fargo, N.D., intercepted the Learjet at 12:54 p.m, reporting that the aircraft's windows were fogged with ice and that no flight control movement could be seen. At 1:14 p.m., the F-16s reported that the Learjet was beginning to spiral toward the ground.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/oct99/crash26.htm

In response to allegations that NORAD responded more quickly to the October 25, 1999, plane crash that killed Payne Stewart than it did to the hijacking of American 11, we compared NORAD’s response time for each incident. The last normal transmission from the Stewart flight was at 9:27:10 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time. The Southeast Air Defense Sector was notified of the event at 9:55, 28 minutes later. In the case of American 11, the last normal communication from the plane was at 8:13 A.M. EDT. NEADS was notified at 8:38, 25 minutes later. We have concluded there is no significant difference in NORAD’s reaction to the two incidents. See NTSB memo, Aircraft Accident Brief for Payne Stewart incident,Oct. 25, 1999; FAA email, Gahris to Myers,“ZJX Timeline for N47BA accident,” Feb. 17, 2004.Footnote 121 to Chapter 1, 9/11 Commission Report

Putting these together with the NTSB report suggests the following points.

First, it takes time before ATC consider they’ve lost contact with a plane. The absence of any radio response was first noted at 9:33, but the controller continued trying to make contact for another 3 or 4 minutes.

Second, Nafeez Ahmed told us above that "procedures also require controllers to immediately alert the military to scramble fighter craft, if a plane deviates from its flight path and communication between the plane and controllers is blocked". But the Stewart case is proof that does not always happen. Radio contact problems began at 9:33, ATC considered the situation an emergency at 9:36, yet according to the reports the FAA only notified the US Air Force Rescue Coordination Centre until 9:45, and NORAD weren't alerted until 9:55 at the earliest. That's 19 minutes after the plane was considered an emergency.

And third, there's the NORAD response time to add on top of that. Here 13 minutes elapsed between SEADS being informed of the situation, and their finding two jets to scramble, then another two minutes before those jets were airborne. (It's conceivable that there may have been some overlap here: SEADS may have asked Tyndall to get two fighters prepared while they tried to find someone closer, then came back and asked them to scramble. The end result remains the same, though - a 15 minute wait).

34 minutes have now passed between a problem first being noted and fighters getting airborne. If this were duplicated on 9/11 then there would be a further few minutes before the fighters could reach their target, and this is a problem when you look at the amount of time available. The 9/11 Commission reported the gap between the “likely takeover time” (the earliest time anyone would have known about the hijacking) and the point each plane reached its final target as follows: Flight 11 (8:14 to 8:47 - 33 minutes), Flight 175 (8:42 to 9:04 - 22 minutes), Flight 77 (8:51 to 9:38 - 47 minutes), Flight 93 (9:27 to 10:04 - 37 minutes). (Source)

And those are the maximum possible times that might have been available for intercept. The reality is people had to become aware that the plane was hijacked, first. In the case of Flight 77, for instance, if you start the clocking ticking when the transponder was turned off, then that gives you only 42 minutes. Start it when American Airlines HQ knows the plane is hijacked, and you're down to 33 minutes.

What the Stewart case tells us, then, is that the FAA response to an emergency is not always quick, and if they performed in the same way on 9/11 then there's little chance that any of the hijacked planes could have been intercepted. And of course even if they had been, there was no shoot-down order: the only difference is that there would have been one or two more witnesses to the final moments of the flight.

Of course this is far too damning a conclusion for some to accept, and so they try to find new ways to minimise its effects. In the 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, for instance, David Ray Griffin comments:

The NTSB memo, unfortunately, gets very confused, making it very difficult for anyone to figure out from it what happened. Part of the confusion seems to be the failure to account for the difference between time zones, but the confusion appears deeper than this. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the conflicts between the various news reports (perhaps due in large part to the confusions in this memo), I myself do not cite the Payne Stewart incident as an example of rapid response time (although it may well have been).9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, David Ray Griffin

It seems Dr Griffin is aware of the time zone issue, but can't quite bring himself to explain to his readers that, if true, the intercept took an hour longer than some people claim. Instead he talks of "confusion" without quite spelling out any example of that, in an effort to persuade you that the official NTSB report can't be relied upon.

Well, the timeline doesn't seem confused to us.

At 0933:38 EDT (6 minutes and 20 seconds after N47BA acknowledged the previous clearance), the controller instructed N47BA to change radio frequencies and contact another Jacksonville ARTCC controller. The controller received no response from N47BA. The controller called the flight five more times over the next 4 1/2 minutes but received no response.

There's EDT in the first time, CDT (an hour later) in the second. The "7" following it is a footnote which reads:

7 About 1010 EDT, the accident airplane crossed from the EDT zone to the CDT zone in the vicinity of Eufaula, Alabama.

It's not a typo, the report specifically mentions the moment the plane changed time zones, and uses the new zone in its timeline. This is arguably confusing - the fact that some journalists didn't notice the time zone change proves that - but it's not confused, and there's no doubt whatsoever that it's talking about an intercept that occurred more than an hour after the problem was first noted. (But please, don't take our word for it. Follow the above link and find out for yourself.)

Others use a simpler strategy, conceding that the Stewart intercept may have taken a while, but claiming that hijacking reports would have received a higher priority, especially after the first impact.

We might argue in return that systems under stress don't necessarily produce improved results: you might hope that individuals faced with an unparalleled national emergency might perform better than in the relatively quiet situation surrounding the Payne Stewart flight, but it wouldn't necessarily be surprising if the opposite were true.

We also suspect that there was nothing of a higher priority going on at SEADS or the FAA during the Stewart incident, and if so it would surely have received their full attention.

However, the key point here is the whole "but Stewart's situation was different and on 9/11 it should have been much faster" argument is speculation and conjecture. And people can put that forward just as much as they like, but it won't change the underlying facts: the Payne Stewart timeline does not support the idea that the FAA immediately informed the military whenever they had a problem, or that intercepts typically took place in 10 or 20 minutes.

Additional Documents

Other intercepts

Is the intercept time in the Payne Stewart case really typical? Perhaps looking at other cases can tell us more.

Bo Rein

On January 10, 1980, football coach Bo Rein was travelling from Shreveport to Houston on board Cessna Conquest N441NC. At around 03:40 GMT Fort Worth Centre made repeated attempts to contact the aircraft, but without success. They asked a nearby Pan American flight to contact the plane instead. The Pan American crew did so at approximately 03:45 GMT, telling the pilot to contact Fort Worth on the assigned en route frequency. The Cessna pilot acknowledged this, and heard him attempt to check in, but reported his transmission as "very weak and barely readable". Fort Worth did not receive the transmission at all.

N441NC had climbed through his assigned altitude by the time the Pan Am crew reached him, and continued to climb until he reached his absolute altitude of around 40,000 feet. No further communications were reported with or from the pilot after his attempt to contact Fort Worth.

The NTSB case documents don't state when a scramble was ordered, unfortunately, reporting only that "F-4 aircraft from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base were scrambled to intercept the aircraft as it flew into the North Carolina aircraft". We do have a better record of the scramble times, though.

At approximately 5:03 GMT Aersospace Defence Command advised that they were scrambling two aircraft from Goldsboro (the Seymour Johnson flights).

"A few minutes later" the scramble was initiated.

Washington ARTCC began working the two fighters at approximately 05:22 GMT, vectoring them towards the Cessna, and they intercepted the flight at around 05:29 GMT.

The last time anyone heard from N441NC would have been around 03:47 GMT, then. We don't know when the military were alerted, but it seems there was no decision to scramble until about 05:00, 73 minutes later. ATC heard about this at 5:03, began assisting the fighters at 5:22, and the intercept was made at 5:29, 102 minutes minutes after the pilot's last communication and 109 minutes after contacting anyone on the ground.

Helios Airways Flight 522

Helios Airways Flight 522 (HCY 522 or ZU522) was a Helios Airways Boeing 737-31S flight that crashed on 14 August 2005 at 12:04 EEST into a mountain north of Marathon and Varnavas, Greece. The timeline for the incident is as follows (AAll times in EEST - UTC + 3h)

9am (0600 GMT) Helios Airlines flight ZU522, a Boeing 737, with 115 passengers and six crew members on board takes off from Larnaca International Airport in Cyprus, heading for Athens, Greece, and then Prague, Czech Republic.

10:30am (0730 GMT) The Greek Defence Ministry issues a Renegade alert, a standard aviation procedure when a plane fails to respond to the control tower.

10:55am (0755 GMT) Two F-16 fighter jets scramble to locate airliner.

11:20am (0820 GMT) Fighter jets spot the Cypriot jet over Aegean island of Kea, but are unable to communicate with pilots.

11:25am (0825 GMT) Fighter jets approach the plane and report that the co-pilot of the Cypriot plane appears unconscious in the cockpit, while the other pilot was absent. Oxygen masks also seem to have been activated in the plane.

12:05pm (0905 GMT) Airliner crashes near coastal town of Grammatiko, about 40 kilometres north of Athens.

We need an official source for all these timeline details before firm conclusions can be drawn. However, as it appears at the moment, the lack of contact was noticed at 10:07 am. It took 23 minutes for this to produce a Renegade alert. It was then a further 25 minutes before jets were scrambled, and another 25 minutes before those jets spotted the missing plane. The total time from noticing the issue to a jet arriving in the vicinity was therefore 73 minutes.